


Don't Touch What You Cannot Fix

by an_environmental_product



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Marauders' Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 20:06:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16604648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/an_environmental_product/pseuds/an_environmental_product
Summary: Although originally a mother's thoughtless scolding, Sirius has always considered it sound advice to not touch what he cannot fix. However, apt to behaving rashly, Sirius reconciled this against his core being by becoming an expert at fixing as many things as he damages: porcelain, priceless needlework, the heavy silences in rooms.But after his betrayal of Remus narrowly misses death, Sirius is growing certain of one thing he can never fix even if not touching it might kill him.(A story of the fall back after Snape is sent benath the Whomping Willow)





	Don't Touch What You Cannot Fix

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SundayDuck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SundayDuck/gifts).



“Don’t touch what you cannot fix.”

She’d snapped the warning at him in a time when he could not have fixed anything—before his magic had come. He took it to heart, but it was harder to act on than it was to believe. Some things broke, or were already broken, in ways unforeseen. Sometimes the way you’d known to fix something no longer worked.

_Don’t touch what you cannot fix._  

The admonition spirals through his head as he leaves the hospital wing behind with a shiver. Usually, Sirius can banish the cold of winter with warmer clothes and a hyperkinetic personality. Usually, his steps don’t drag so slowly through the icy undercurrent that flows between the castle’s stones to penetrate its insides. 

Sirius stops and lets out a breath hotter than the air of the corridor. The moment his mouth opens comes a bang, a clatter, the sound of footsteps, as though he were a record player. His mouth snaps shut and he swings himself around, wand in hand, chest open and squared. His sternum only becomes the perfect target for a shoulder whose height is just below his own. 

Freezing stone meets the back of his head, a hand buries and twists in the collar of his shirt, tie askew and pressing against his throat. 

“What the hell is wrong with you lately?” 

“James—” Sirius’ defender is meek and easily cut off with a— 

“No! I need to know. I need to know what the bloody hell has been going through your head. I didn’t say anything when you started kicking Peter around, or snapping at me, or running off on Remus whenever he tries to get through your thickened skull to find out what’s wrong. I just figured it’d peter out like any other tantrum, but this? What—how—what the fuck, Sirius!”

James’ voice cracks on the name of his supposed brother. His hand gives Sirius’ shirt one last shake; his head, one last rap against the wall before James pulls away abruptly, fingers held apart as though covered in slime.

Sirius has never seen James’ face like this up close. He’s only ever seen it—nose screwed up, eyes narrowed, lips dragged down—in profile or in a glance over James’ shoulder to see if Sirius has his back. He hasn’t noticed until now that when James wears this expression, a stony crack forms in the middle of his brow.

His breath rips lungs against ribs too tense to expand. The cold both dries and brings tears to eyes that cannot blink.

“He had it coming.” His voice is weak.

“Who did?” James demands. “Remus? Did Remus have it coming? What would have happened to a—” James cuts off, looks around. His voice lowers in volume but not intensity—“what would have happened if he had hurt someone—is that what Remus had coming?”

He wishes he could feign ignorance. But he’s a Black, raised a scion. So little that goes on in the laws of his country are unknown to him. He knows, raised as he was on tales of how dangerous werewolves are; how gleeful their punishers when they’re ‘put down’ after an attack, exactly what would happen.

He simply, in a moment of madness, had not thought to care.

“Just say no. Just say ‘no, he didn’t have it coming.’”

Snape could have died. Remus could have been sentenced to do the same.

Just admit you’re wrong, Sirius. Admit it. Apologize.

“Snape’s the one who had it coming,” he grinds out instead.

James throws a hand up so close to Sirius’ face that Sirius wonders if it isn’t an aborted attempt to punch him.

“Gods. Merlin. Piss off.” It’s James who screams it in Sirius’ face, yet it’s James who does the ‘pissing off,’ walking so fast that Wormtail, always much shorter than the other three, nearly has to jog to keep up.

But then, even though it will lose him precious distance on his friend, Peter turns with surprising fire in his eyes.

“Tell that to Remus!”

The lunch crowd slams and shrieks through the doors of the Great Hall, and Sirius’ friends—are they still friends?—are gone.

 

:::::::::::::::::::::

 

Why won’t you tell me.

Sirius could see the question in Remus’ eyes, though the gaze no longer held the shimmer of a question mark. It had darkened and deepened to resignation. A statement between them: final, unyielding. There would be no answer, so therefore it could hardly be a question.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“I can’t.” That was all that Sirius had provided each time, back when they would sometimes bother to have the conversation aloud.

He imagined the darkness of his family and their poison clouding the bright amber eyes that stared into his own, and he couldn’t tell. He didn’t want their filth anywhere near Remus. Still, he had never bottled up something from both Remus and James before, and this something had enough pressure behind it Sirius felt his eyes might cook in his skull.

“Why not?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Then why would I ask?”

“Because you don’t realize!”

Remus frowned disapprovingly at the raised tone. Even Sirius wasn’t exempt from Remus’ careful belief in civility, nor should he be. Sirius agreed with the unfairness and overall uselessness of raising your voice to someone who would rarely raise their voice back. That was why, if there was something he had to rage about, he still went to James, who often then told Remus because if there was one thing Sirius hated, it was admitting something painful twice.

But this he brought to neither. So how could Remus know, then, that it was a rage? How could he know that what Sirius cared about was how his actions had caused years of political intrigue turned silent civil war to fall on his family’s necks? How could he know that Sirius caring made Sirius even angrier than the fact itself?

His brother had had to sign up for some nonsense Sirius had escaped himself, because if he didn’t then who else was left who would, and because if no one did then the whole family was a failure.

His uncle had been disowned just for giving him money, because if they didn’t disown anyone laying down Sirius’ path then the family had let him do it, and then the entire family was a failure.

His family was next to blood traitors in a time where blood traitors were being quietly killed off because now the family had birthed two of them, and one of them had been meant to reverse the tide and live up to his name and lead them, but he had ran.

“There’s no point in talking about it,” Sirius finally murmured, looking down at a book of hexes and counterhexes as well as the theory behind both.

There was no point in talking about it because Sirius didn’t care. His family was a bunch of dark, murderous bastards with stuffed house-elf heads lining the stairwell instead of family pictures, and curse scars on their children and their children’s walls from when they’d missed, and dark souls and black hearts and grimoires of blood.

Hang them all. Especially his stupid baby brother, who would most likely murder, one day, not only a being, like a run-down house-elf, but a human being.

_Don’t touch what you cannot fix._

He wouldn’t touch them, then. Not even in his heart.

His uncle, his cousin, himself, and his friends: those were Sirius’ only real family.

“Is it about your brother?”

He couldn’t move his neck. He tried, with a spastic twitch, but to no other result.

“What makes you ask?”

“I saw you two. You were yelling at him. That night, I said I was coming up from the kitchens. I was, but…”

As good a liar as Remus could be, Sirius had had a hunch that there was more to what Remus had told him. He just hadn’t suspected that the lie had been so personal that the omission was about himself. Irritation whipped through him, and when he could finally look up, it was with a glare.

“No.” His voice was iron. His book slammed shut; he left his weight on it as he pushed himself up from the table. “It’s not about my brother.”

 

:::::::::::::::::::::

 

The night after James yells at him, Sirius dreams. He dreams about amber eyes and soft kisses and warm laughter. He dreams about grass run through lazy fingertips and lazy fingertips run through hair. He dreams about the heat of Remus around him. He dreams about harsh gasps muffled by gentle arms wrapped strong around another body. He dreams about sighs that turn to moans and moans that turn to—

Screams.

Why?

Why the hell would you do this?

Sirius wakes. He can hear Remus’ voice bellowing the words clear as day although Remus has never yelled such a thing in Sirius’ life.

The reality at the hospital wing had been much quieter: a puffy stare in a silent room where the loudest sense had been the stinging, bitter smell of medicinal herbs. The accusation stabbed Sirius in the chest regardless. Doubtless, if Remus had tried to let it out into air, such sharpness would have shredded him inside out, fried his vocal chords, left them both dead.

 

:::::::::::::::::::::

 

Sirius spun. This time, the footsteps he heard trailing him did not dissipate in time with his own, and he could no longer rationalize them away. Stone was not a sneak’s friend. Wand out, Sirius yelled toward them.

“Come out.”

There was a pause followed by a flicker of movement followed by Hogwart’s unfriendly neighborhood greaseball.

“Following me again? You know, usually when I’m followed at night it’s by girls.”

“Girls like Lupin?” Snape didn’t miss a beat, damn him. He never did.

Sirius snarled. “What do you want?”

“I want to know where you’re going, obviously. That’s usually the motive for following someone. I know you four are up to something. Sneaking in and out of the castle, coming back in the morning after being gone all night.”

“Jealous?”

“Hardly. Jealous of the Headmaster’s ability to expel you, perhaps.”

“Why don’t you just go make love to a potions book.”

Snape smirked. The beetles he called eyes crawled first one way on his face, then the other as he tried to summon up the brain power to think of a new tactic. When he spoke next, his voice was nearly a whisper.

“Have you heard from your brother? I mean… I wouldn’t worry, if I were you, but I might want to make up for your own sake. I heard he’s made… allies. Allies we share. Allies you might not want following you in my stead.”

Sirius froze, suspicions thrown right into his face. In the dark seemed to flash black hoods, circling a table covered in black candles and blood, the same ones he’d once walked in on as a child sleeping over his cousin’s. But now, beneath one was a pair of deep-set blue-grey eyes that nearly matched his own.

“You want to know? You really want to know where we go?”

Snape did nothing but let out a tsk that was part laughter, derisive as always, a sneer under that ridiculously long, hooked nose. Under the full moon, his skin shone nearly translucent, dark eyes buglike.

“Why don’t you just prod the knot at the bottom of the Whomping Willow and find out? All you need is a branch. Shouldn’t be hard to find, yeah? If it’s anywhere within a five kilometer radius, it’ll be right under your nose.”

Snivellus’ brow rose. Evidently he hadn’t expected so much help.

Sirius wanted to cackle, then. Oh he’d heard they were trying to make allies with werewolves, those hypocritical fuckers. That they would use them and then put them down as soon as they’ve seen enough blood…

Or as soon as the type of werewolf who would follow them turned on them next. Part of Sirius hoped the werewolves got every last one of them. It would serve them right, wouldn’t it? Weren’t werewolves all just people like Remus once? Or could have been? If the world hadn’t been so cruel—hadn’t given them only one choice.

Snivellus wasn’t the only Death Eater wannabe who could use some rightfully-owned fear in his life. But he was the only one that Sirius could personally send into the den.

“See you on the other side,” he said, innocently, trying not to sound as sadistic as he felt. Snape didn’t need to know that he meant the other side of the veil.

“Oh you won’t see much of me, Black, will you. Once you’re expelled.”

Sirius’s laugh was harsh. “Here’s hoping you turn up just like the rest of my family.”

“I’m sure that will be a source of contention for you. Especially once we’re on the top like we were meant to be, and you turn out like the rest of the bloodtraitors and mudbloods.”

Lip curled, Sirius held his tongue for once. No point in correcting him. They’d lose this thing, right? They had to. And Snape, well, his participation would be cut so tragically short after tonight.

Sirius gave him a mock salute, then turned his back on the full moon.

_Don’t touch what you cannot fix._

Of course, he knew Snape would never go through with it. Snape was a coward. And what kind of coward went through tunnels beneath trees when the full moon was high and there was a howl in the air?

 

:::::::::::::::::::::

 

Remus sits across the common room, bandaged up. It’s a miracle no one notices the way his injuries hold out against Madam Pomfrey like no other. It’s a miracle no one puts together that each injury is a claw-shaped curse scar that could only be brought on by a werewolf. Sirius noticed, four years ago:

“You think I’m a werewolf?”

Trying to lighten the mood, Sirius joked “Well either that or you’ve been off in a monthly cage match with one.”

Such humor worked between them then—back when Remus was relieved enough to laugh and trusted his good intentions. Before Remus spit out a week ago that Sirius was just the bigot he’d been raised to be. That Sirius had used him for murder. That Sirius hadn’t cared that Remus would die as well. Werewolves had died for less.

Sirius stares from afar, the way he once did before he’d realized why. This is a different type of heartsick, now. He knows what he wants, why he wants it, and, worse, what it’s like to have it.

_Don’t touch what you cannot fix._

It was because he’d used to be able to fix it that he’d been fooled.

Those amber eyes would go too wide or too narrow with pain, and Sirius would gather him up in jokes, bracing words, an embrace. Later, he could even kiss those tired lines on Remus’ face away. Brush off a frown with fingertips. Smooth out with palms the pain from beneath old scars and new hurts alike.

Sirius shrinks against the table where he sits while James and Peter gather around Remus.

_Don’t touch what you cannot fix._

James tries a grin; Peter wears the solemnity of a funeral. Neither expression helps much. Remus barely takes his quill away from his homework. But he answers their questions, their jokes, their stories. And that’s more than Sirius can say.

Slowly, slowly, without Sirius, they prompt Remus to laugh. It bubbles like warm water trickling down stones. The sound washes down Sirius’ shoulders, a comfort he doesn’t deserve as the work behind it is not his own.

Wide, sad eyes, chin against the wood of the table, Sirius feels like a dog. Head tilting down, he brings his hands up and places them in sight, then over his head like an execution. Laughter rings out again from across the room as he is enveloped by the darkness in his arms.


End file.
